Category: Entertainment

I’ve been looking at the Lightberry for a little while now and have been thinking about how I’ll be implementing it once I actyually buy it and add it to my setup.

The Lightberry is pretty cool, it works with a Raspberri Pi and a bunch of video grabbing / repeating so you can get lights behind your television that look like those really expensive TV’s for about 1/10th of the cost.

Of course, I wanted to go a step furthur than the default setup and have it so I could also control my Phillips hue lights to go along with the display on the screen. Originally, I was thinking this would be neat in video games or movies, but in practice it was a little annoying.

However, I still think it would be really neat to get these going for music visualization, so I’ll have a really high tech color organ basically.

Note, that you may have compile problems with it saying it can’t find COPY_ONLY, this was apparently due to a typo in some documentation, so it made it into this. Here’s how you fix that;

# cd ~/Documents/hyperion
# nano cmake/qt4/Qt4Macros.cmake

Now just find the instance of COPY_ONLY and replace it with COPYONLY. Close and save the file. Then re-try compiling the program

Create a configuration file, mine is attached below (which is the same as their example, except I changed bootup to Knight rider effect instead). Download my hue.json configuration file here. Copy it to your /opt/hyperion/config directory and change the username, as well as the IP.

Start Hyperion like this

# sudo /opt/hyperion/bin/hyperiond /opt/hyperion/config/hue.json.txt

Now you should see the lights come on, and do the initial boot sequence. Yay!

Now, because I don’t yet have the Lightberry, I can only test with Kodi / XBMC or the Hyperion Free app for Android for it to get it’s color data from. I primarily (only) use PLEX so, this was a problem but I assume it will be solved once I have the frame grabber, and use the tools provided by Lightberry.

So, for now if I want visualizations to the music played, I open up Kodi / XBMC and play music from there and the lights pulsate to it as expected.

Once I get the lightberry, I’ll remove Kodi from the equation, as everything going through my receiver has one output to the telvision, which I’ll capture and use instead. Much easier!